7/18 PBE Update: Pentakill Olaf Texture Update & More Tentative Balance Changes

The PBE has been updated! Tonight's PBE update includestweaks for Pentakill Olaf's textures and the usual selection of more tentative balance changes.
Continue reading for more information!

Table of Contents

• Skin Tweaks
• Miscellaneous
• Balance Changes
• Context & Notes

Skin Tweaks

Pentakill Olaf has some texture updates on the PBE today, brightening the colors.

Miscellaneous

• KateyKhaos tweeted a small change on Winter Wonder Orianna's recall: 

"Winter Wonder Orianna's recall poros have been updated to the newer, cuter versions as seen on Howling Abyss! :)

Cho'Gath
[Context]

• Vorpal Spikes (E)
• Damage changed from 20/35/50/65/80 to 20/30/40/50/60
• Enemy health percent lowered from 4% to 3%

Kayn
[context]

• Shadow Step (E) tooltip updated for clarity. No gameplay change.

Base form

Shadow Assassin form

Context & Notes

Context! Why'd it have to be context?

1) Here's Meddler with his Quick Gameplay Thoughts for July 18, covering Duskblade, Kayn, and more late cycle balance changes:

"Hi folks, 

Usual Disclaimers 

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get put delayed or even stopped.
If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler 

Duskblade 

Context in a previous post for anyone that missed it about how we'll be hotfixing more often now: https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/developer-corner/qXAN1k8U-quick-gameplay-thoughts-july-14 

We put out a hotfix to Duskblade yesterday, taking some damage off it. Compared to champion balance it tends to be harder to get a quick read on things with a more systemic effect like items, hence this balance hotfix being quite a bit after the patch compared to what you'd expect for an individual character (needed the extra time over the weekend to make a better assessment). We'll be continuing to work on Duskblade in 7.15 at least as well, with the damage nerf not expected to be a final solve but instead just taking the edge off. Making the slow melee only's the likely first step, we're also considering lowering the damage again for ranged at least as well. Call on that will depend in part on how the somewhat nerfed version now on live performs. 

The intent with that ranged damage nerf wouldn't be to make Duskblade unusable on ranged champions, but instead to make it appropriately powerful on them. Items like Duskblade should be reasonable fits on ranged AD caster champs, not just AD melee, so the issue is we believe not that they're using it in the first place, but that it's too effective on them comparatively. 

Kayn 

Still watching Kayn, doesn't look like he'll need any balance changes in 7.15. Player performance on him continues to improve as people get more experience, with a lot of the early failures starting to disappear now. We'll take another look in 7.16, looking in particular to see if things have stabilized enough to give a better read on assassin performance versus darkin performance (assassin's been lower, but we believe has been climbing more, so want to see how each form levels out, not just their comparative starting points). 7.15 will contain a number of bug fixes though for various bits and pieces on him. 

Additional 7.15 balance changes 

Looking at how the jungle meta's changed/champs have performed we've got a few late changes coming in for 7.15: 

• Cho - Now too strong (buffs went too far). We'll be cutting some of the flat damage and % damage off E as a result (current numbers in testing: 20-60 and 3% instead of 20-80 and 4%). We did consider hotfix nerfing Cho along with Singed and Nunu, but concluded his state wasn't getting out of line as quickly and his counters were clearer.
• Lee Sin/RekSai - We'll be pulling the nerfs to these two we've had in testing, at least from 7.15. Goal with them was to open up jungle options more, we're already seeing shifts more towards tank junglers (in part driven by Cinderhulk changes) so belief is these nerfs made sense in the previous context but arguably don't at present. Will revisit after seeing where 7.15 lands.

2) On Twitter, ricklessabandon gave more info on the Udyr reverts this cycle:

[1] sorry -- i was quiet this past cycle the udyr changes on the pbe last cycle were in need of iteration, validation, etc and didn't get it

[2] i was planning on doing a least a few new iterations, but timeline was looking too tight so i pushed to move him to a 'slow cook' instead

[3] udyr changes should be getting legit iterations (and actual explicit context) in the near future, but we're not in a rush